e-space
Manchester Metropolitan University's Research Repository

    Fragments of time and memory

    Scanlan, John (2011) Fragments of time and memory. European Journal of English Studies, 15 (1). pp. 19-29. ISSN 1744-4233

    File not available for download.

    Abstract

    This essay looks at the emergence and development, through technology, of the modern auditory world and asks what its existence in the evolving matrices of time, space and the human body can offer to our understanding of matter and material culture today. The first part explores the materialisation of time in phonographic sound as an instance of the fragmentation of modern life, and how this displaced the temporal experience of the premodern world. The second part looks at the impact of magnetic tape recording – its materiality and malleability – which permitted sound artists to produce multitemporal audio collages that advanced the modern soundscape into the realm of Benjamin's ‘dialectical images’. The essay concludes with a consideration of how the material culture of sound ends in the human body – its final materialism – just as the old sound objects of analogue technology appear to be dematerialised.

    Impact and Reach

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    0Downloads
    6 month trend
    346Hits

    Additional statistics for this dataset are available via IRStats2.

    Altmetric

    Repository staff only

    Edit record Edit record